“What’s brown and sticky?”

“A stick.”

This one’s been doing the rounds in my family for as long as I can remember.

I get the sentiment, and I’ve said it before but when my current daily goes, an EV of some sort will likely take its place. Even given the poor charging infrastructure where I am, mathematically it is clearly the sensible choice.

But for the things I can’t measure with a calculator, I’ll have at least one ICE vehicle for a long as it’s feasible to do so. There are boxes that EVs - and I’ve spent plenty of time with them - simply don’t tick for me.

On top of the obvious it would have to introduce a lot of flexibility in scripts. They can just hand-wave some otherwise absurd things if they have effectively unlimited resources at their disposal.

Neo Geo

You’re mixing up social media grandstanding with actual sentencing.

Barra the world!

Holden and Ford Australia. Partly for personal nostalgic reasons but also because of local engineering and manufacturing. A bit of our national identity disappeared when they shut down, although they were owned by US companies they were still a source of Aussie pride. Nowadays we have no local industry and it all just feels a bit hollow. Like watching sports when you have no local team.

I doubt they’d be able to make them these days but seeing as we’re talking hypotheticals, there’s something about a big cube V8 or turbo 6 that’s missing from everything since. Yes I know on here the hive mind demands we boo ands hiss if someone dares to like anything ICE, and when our current runabout goes it’ll likely be replaced by an EV of some sort. But for us, cars are a hobby and a source of enjoyment too, and I dare say we’ll have at least one ICE vehicle for a long as it’s feasible for us to do so. And if I can get a semi-modern nod to the past that would be perfect.

And if the Japanese car industry could go back to the 90s I’d be pretty stoked about that too!

I agree with the sentiment but I also don’t like a lot of modern “safety” systems. Many are just a box-ticking exercise for star ratings and arguably do more harm than good. If you’ve ever had lane keeping blindly follow lane markings in roadworks with temporary redirections in place I’m sure you know what I mean!

Yeah, nah

This reads more like “I have an opinion and want to hear people agree with me” than an actual question.

If it is a genuine question then the way it’s framed means you’re less likely for the people who would answer “yes” to actually reply. Well, the ones still able to do so despite the terrible medical advice they’ve been getting, anyway.

I guess my point was more about it being an issue in professional settings as well, where the people should be technical.

One of technology’s biggest achievements is making it such that someone who doesn’t care how something works doesn’t need to worry about that in order to use it.

Joking aside I do actually worry about how superficial technical knowledge is becoming.

Turns every toothbrush into an electric toothbrush

Every now and again I find the Ulysses 31 intro playing in my head for no reason, and I’m ok with that.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ4c1X5ene8

Actual song starts ~40s in

A few things come to mind, with the caveat of course this is all from a layman’s perspective and may be misinformed, dumb, or otherwise not feasible.

Basic stuff:

• More frequent services. Aside from the sardine tins they can become during peak times, lengthy waits, particularly in bad weather, aren’t great. It also softens the blow if there’s a service fault (only a few minutes until the next one comes by).
• Disincentivise service cancellations, a late service is better than one that doesn’t run at all. It won’t always be possible to avoid cancelling, but I’m told the cancellation penalty can be less severe than the punctuality one.
• Chain/rework service SLAs with an “overall service” goal. It’s frustrating when your service has been delayed, and the connecting service you would have caught leaves empty but on time to meet their own timeliness metrics.
• Perhaps linked to that, I have to wonder how wise it is to contract these things out. Not sure what the answer is as having it all be govt-run doesn’t fill me with optimism either, maybe rethinking how contracts are written and awarded needs a rethink - but moving the focus from serving the public need to minimising cost/maximising profit cannot possibly be in the best interests of the commuter.

More ambitious:

• There need to be trains that go between the existing lines, concentric circles around the city essentially. To visit a friend who lives only about 15km from me, using PT the train-only option involves travelling into the city, swapping trains, then travelling out of the city on his line. It’s over 2 hours of travel. Adding buses brings that down to about 75-80 mins. Driving there takes me 20.
• Smarter express services that make a meaningful difference to trip times. Eg buses where the pickup/dropoff stops are preset (bookable?), maybe even dynamic routes based on the stops required? Dunno, this is a tough one but on my commute the current “express” option saves only 3 minutes lol.
• More separated roadways for buses, so they are less at the mercy of other traffic. That has the added benefit of reducing the volume of that other traffic, so things get better for both PT and private vehicles.
• More 3+ line rails, to allow for passing. That would reduce the flow-on impacts of delays to a service, and would allow for more express services that don’t have to accommodate catching an all-stops one.
• Better start-of-trip options. Park and ride sounds good but they are always packed, and are basically just a shopping centre for car thieves who know the owners will likely not be back until 5pm or so. We’ve already lost one car this way, insured but it was a massive headache. Airport-style shuttle buses perhaps? Something that might allow a pushbike to be transported too, as that might help with the last-km issues.
• More of a societal thing than being PT-specific, but move away from the “one big CBD” model. Everybody wanting to converge on more or less the same point puts a huge amount of concentrated pressure on a system. That system has to be designed and funded to accommodate these enormous peaks, but will be massive overkill at other times. Distributing the destinations reduces that concentration, but also helps to justify better services in areas that everyone currently leaves because they have to go to the city instead.

There are no doubt tons of others but that’s a start.

Yeah cost is only one consideration, for me there are a lot of reasons that I generally choose not to take PT. It works ok for certain scenarios, but is usually the worse option by a significant margin. Even being free isn’t enough to tip the scales the vast majority of the time, particularly when non-cost considerations are included.

My motorcycle gets me to work in less than half the time, leaves on my schedule, I know I’ll get a seat, I can use the one vehicle for the whole trip, it’s far more reliable, I get sick less often (thanks, people who take PT when they are clearly unwell), not to mention that I enjoy riding anyway which is in itself a decent incentive. Taking the car still ticks these boxes - it takes longer than the bike but is still far quicker than PT, plus I can take bulky/heavy things that simply aren’t feasible to take on PT, and it’s a negligible additional cost to take others with me. That said I’m lucky to have parking at work, if that wasn’t the case it would be far less feasible.

And that’s for the city-and-back trips that I assume PT has been optimised for. For any other trips, PT rarely makes sense, though PT being free does address the issue of paying separately for each passenger (eg 4 people going to the city and back costs ~$45 on PT, ~$10 in the car).

If I’m to actively choose PT over bike/car it needs to be the better choice. And it needs to do that by improving, not by simply adding barriers to alternatives.

I just run on two mini PCs.

One running OPNsense, fanless N5105, 4x 2.5Gb, it doesn’t need much disk or memory but at the time it was a negligible additional cost to go to 16GB and 500GB.

The other is running Proxmox, on a Ryzen 7 7840HS, 96GB RAM, 500GB SSD, and with two 5TB USB HDDs plugged in (rotated with a third that I keep at a friend’s place as a cheap but fit for purpose offsite backup).

It’s just them plus a managed 2.5Gb switch and a couple of wifi routers in AP-only mode. It costs very little to run power-wise and is more than enough grunt for my needs.

Sigh. I haven’t actually run a non-standard firmware for a while now, but I’m finding the mindset of a lot of these big companies exhausting, the relentless push for them to control every aspect of everything. Particularly when they’re charging huge amounts for the device and to my mind at least can’t claim they’ve somehow subsidised the hardware.

I was forced to bin my original C64, tape deck, disk drive, joysticks, a couple of printers (one was a daisy wheel lol), many many games and apps and my own projects etc. It still saddens me thinking about it.

These stories rub a bit of salt in the wound but it’s pretty cool that there’s still interest in them. They were a fantastic thing - easy to use for the basics, powerful enough that once you moved past those basics (and BASIC itself) it still had plenty to offer. And crucially, in a modern context, it’s not so advanced that it leaves nothing for you to do - you still need to figure things out for yourself, and there’s a lot of satisfaction in figuring out a hack to make it do something. So good.

I’m tempted to get one but that’s a rabbit hole I’m not sure I have the time for these days!

Came across this which I’ve not validated but does seem to make sense at a glance: Comparison of WLTP and CLTC

Based on that the WLTP range would be 828-900km (515-560 miles).

Real world, 6-700km at a guess?